1.3.10 - not actually 4GB?

[KMA]

Wow, 3.14GB? What the heck do you have loaded? Even after upping my entire landscape file to 4096^2 (which is a ridiculous waste of resources) the folder came out at 4GB and my use in game was 3GB. I wish I had stayed around for another three minutes to see that you actually had some proof, as it would have saved about an hours worth of conversion. At least I have the means to stress test the game (compressing my test landscape folder right now). :biggrin:

 

Regardless, my hypothesis is now smashed to pieces as I have also seen the game using 3GB. So now I have to begin bug-hunting in both INI files to find what is causing this. I will post back once I have an answer.

 

I have modified the first post (what a nice thing to be able to do) so that new readers will know it is not hard-coded.

 

EDIT - I have reduced my preloading and that has not improved anything, in fact I now tend to crash at as little as 1.92GB. I will just have to do a binary pattern on the two INI files until I track down the offending variable. Figuring out why it is not working will come afterward (assuming it is a single entry).

 

 

EDIT 2 - Well after many hours of systematic testing, I can say that it is no one setting that is doing this. The crashes appear to all be BEX (Array Overflows), though most of the time there is no reporting back to windows, so you only get the rude dump to desktop. These are tied to the shaders, and if you have all the shadows and reflection/refractions on, AND, you hit a memory leak (marked by floating effect/object), you get a nice crash.

 

Now the really strange thing is that I still have plenty of RAM left (even with the oversized landscape files running), and if my memory use is low (say after a reload), then that area will not cause a crash - just a lag. It does increase the RAM use by about 100MB (suddenly when the lag clears), but it is not enough to warrant the crash. If it were just RAM use then when I run the regular sized version I would only just hit 1.9-2.0GB of RAM when it crashes (3.2-3.3 for the oversized trials).

 

So it looks like they have quite a few bugs left to clean up. I am going to roll-back to patch 1 since it was stable and see if it is just 1.3.10. If it is the patch that makes it unstable, I will report back. Cheers!

 

Final Edit - Nope! Rolling back a patch does not seem possible. I will not re-DL the game to reinstall. So I went looking to see if there was any info and I came across two other people who also ran texture mods and as soon as they were hitting 2GB they were getting crashes. They also though it was at the memory leaks (when the game gets laggy in the middle of nowhere - but they did not have floating bits to mark some of them like I do). Anyway, I am chalking this up to another defective patch, and nerfing my INI settings until Beth actually patches this thing properly.

 

Look up when you start to lag in the wilderness and see if there are any sprites, or objects, or even decals just hanging 2-4m above the ground. I have hit them with fireballs, and some are mobile, while others are locked. It is probably random crap that got trapped in a overflow error, and became a memory leak. So much for re-writing most of the code...

Edited January 14, 2012 by KMA

[Blocky]

Wow, 3.14GB? What the heck do you have loaded? Even after upping my entire landscape file to 4096^2 (which is a ridiculous waste of resources) the folder came out at 4GB and my use in game was 3GB. I wish I had stayed around for another three minutes to see that you actually had some proof, as it would have saved about an hours worth of conversion. At least I have the means to stress test the game (compressing my test landscape folder right now). :biggrin:

 

Regardless, my hypothesis is now smashed to pieces as I have also seen the game using 3GB. So now I have to begin bug-hunting in both INI files to find what is causing this. I will post back once I have an answer.

 

I have modified the first post (what a nice thing to be able to do) so that new readers will know it is not hard-coded.

 

EDIT - I have reduced my preloading and that has not improved anything, in fact I now tend to crash at as little as 1.92GB. I will just have to do a binary pattern on the two INI files until I track down the offending variable. Figuring out why it is not working will come afterward (assuming it is a single entry).

 

 

EDIT 2 - Well after many hours of systematic testing, I can say that it is no one setting that is doing this. The crashes appear to all be BEX (Array Overflows), though most of the time there is no reporting back to windows, so you only get the rude dump to desktop. These are tied to the shaders, and if you have all the shadows and reflection/refractions on, AND, you hit a memory leak (marked by floating effect/object), you get a nice crash.

 

Now the really strange thing is that I still have plenty of RAM left (even with the oversized landscape files running), and if my memory use is low (say after a reload), then that area will not cause a crash - just a lag. It does increase the RAM use by about 100MB (suddenly when the lag clears), but it is not enough to warrant the crash. If it were just RAM use then when I run the regular sized version I would only just hit 1.9-2.0GB of RAM when it crashes (3.2-3.3 for the oversized trials).

 

So it looks like they have quite a few bugs left to clean up. I am going to roll-back to patch 1 since it was stable and see if it is just 1.3.10. If it is the patch that makes it unstable, I will report back. Cheers!

 

Final Edit - Nope! Rolling back a patch does not seem possible. I will not re-DL the game to reinstall. So I went looking to see if there was any info and I came across two other people who also ran texture mods and as soon as they were hitting 2GB they were getting crashes. They also though it was at the memory leaks (when the game gets laggy in the middle of nowhere - but they did not have floating bits to mark some of them like I do). Anyway, I am chalking this up to another defective patch, and nerfing my INI settings until Beth actually patches this thing properly.

 

Look up when you start to lag in the wilderness and see if there are any sprites, or objects, or even decals just hanging 2-4m above the ground. I have hit them with fireballs, and some are mobile, while others are locked. It is probably random crap that got trapped in a overflow error, and became a memory leak. So much for re-writing most of the code...

 

I modded my Skyrimprefs.ini file with additional commands for better performance (e.g. bUseThreaded..., loadinbackground, etc). I also upped the shadow, texture, water reflection resolutions. Even though my frame rate was high at bout 50 frames per second, it was giving me random CTDs combined with hi res texture mods. I didn't realize the tweaked Skyrimprefs.ini was the problem until I deleted it and started over with a default one. Before I was sometimes getting a CTD at around 10 mins, then later on it became a reliable CTD at about 8 mins. Now I get no CTDs, or at least none after a couple hours of running the game.

 

Maybe a tweaked Skyrimprefs.ini or Skyrim.ini is not working well together with some of your textures.